International Journal of Communication 14(2020), 2946–2963 1932–8036/20200005 Beyond Bourdieu: The Interactionist Foundations of Media Practice Theory PETER LUNT University of Leicester, UK In the practice turn, the critique of interactionism, along with structuralism, has led to the relative neglect of the analysis of the role and significance of interaction in social practice. This trend continues in theories of media and practice. I argue that Goffman’s interactionist accounts of self-presentation, interaction ritual, and frame analysis provide a rich resource for studying the role of interaction in social practices. I reprise Bourdieu’s theory of practice, its influence on the study of media and practice, and criticism of this tradition of research. Goffman’s interactionist perspective is presented in contrast to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The potential value of such a perspective is illustrated through Goffman’s own study of gender advertisements and by media research using the concept of “participation frameworks” to analyze online mediated social interaction. I end with reflections on the potential of an interactionist perspective on media and practice. Keywords: theory of practice, social practice, dramaturgy, interaction ritual, Bourdieu, Goffman The practice turn (Schatzki, 2001), and its influence on theorizing media and practice (Bräuchler & Postill, 2010; Couldry, 2004), is grounded in the critique of other approaches to social and cultural theory. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) theory of practice, for example, was grounded in the critique of both structural anthropology and the pairing of phenomenology and interactionism. More recently, Reckwitz (2002) distinguishes practice theory from mentalist, textual, and intersubjective theories of culture, the latter encompassing interactionism. In consequence, the long tradition of research in interactionism, illustrated here by the work of Goffman (1959, 1967, 1974), which analyses social interaction as a key element in social practices, has been neglected in the study of media and practice. I argue that the analytic distinctions that provide the negative justification for practice theory have carried over into the study of media and practice in the focus on institutional practices as providing an anchoring of everyday life practices. I begin with a review of the theoretical grounding of Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) analytic distinctions among practice theory, structuralism, and the pairing of phenomenology and interactionism, and the influence of these conceptions on accounts of media and practice. This is followed by an account of Goffman’s analysis of interaction in comparison with Bourdieu’s approach to practice in which interaction is a key element of social practice and critical to self-formation and the constitution of interaction order. Two Peter Lunt: [email protected] Date submitted: 2018–12–17 Copyright © 2020 (Peter Lunt). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Beyond Bourdieu 2947 examples of interactionist analysis of practice illustrate the potential value of his approach, one from Goffman’s (1979) Gender Advertisements and the other from recent research on online mediated social interaction (Hutchby, 2014). I end with conclusions on the potential value of recognizing interaction as a key element of practice and the potential contribution of Goffman’s analysis of media contents and mediated interaction (Lunt, forthcoming). The Practice Turn In his influential paper, Schatzki (2001) recognizes the diverse theoretical contributions to the theory of practice from philosophy, social theory, empirical studies of social interaction, and the social studies of science. He also notes the breadth of the practice turn across the social and cultural sciences as researchers engage with questions of how subjectivity and the material world are constituted and sustained through practice, how meaning and intelligibility are grounded in use and performance, in the acknowledgment of the dialectic (Bourdieu, 1977) or recursive (Giddens, 1984) relation between structure and agency, and the implications of practice for the sociology of action. Although Schatzki (2001) acknowledges the contribution of Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration, it is the work of Bourdieu that he identifies as having had the clearest and most sustained influence on the practice turn. This influence is both through his original articulation of practice theory in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977), restated in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1990), and through a series of brilliant and original empirical studies in the sociology of culture including the link between consumption and social class (Bourdieu, 1984), art, literature, and culture (Bourdieu, 1993), education and social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), and language and power (Bourdieu, 1992). These studies apply and elaborate Bourdieu’s original formulation of practice theory in which key concepts of structuring and practice, fields and habitus, and forms of symbolic, economic, cultural, and social capital provide both a framework and a means for elaboration and reflection on social practice. Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice Bourdieu’s (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice was an ambitious intervention in mid-20th- century French social and cultural theory dominated by structuralism and phenomenology (Joas & Knöbl, 2011; Susen & Turner, 2011). Working within the framework of the structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1966), the leading structural anthropologist of his day, Bourdieu (1977) focuses on the practices of participants as strategic responses to social rules and norms. Through ethnographic research with the Kabyle, a Berber people of North Africa, Bourdieu sought to understand the role of social practice in the reproduction of kinship structures and associated marriage rituals and myths. In this way, Bourdieu contests the structural analysis of social reproduction as resulting from conformity to rules derived from existing structures and affirmed by myths, beliefs, and behavior. His skepticism partly arose from his reading of Wittgenstein’s (1951) criticisms of rule following as an account of making and interpreting meaning and his alternative conception of language as a practical accomplishment set in the context of forms of life. Bourdieu was equally dismissive of phenomenology and interactionism (Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1959, 1967), which he regarded as giving too much ground to experience and sense making in social 2948 Peter Lunt International Journal of Communication 14(2020) interaction while paying insufficient attention to the constraints that shape both the context for social interaction and the resources available to social actors. His view was that subjectivism denies the way that experience is shaped by the objective economic, social, and cultural conditions within which people live, and thereby also denies the way that reflexivity about the conditions of existence influences the strategies people adopt to realize freedom under constraints. He contends that Lévi-Strauss represented a broad approach to the social and cultural sciences that he termed “objectivism” as a “social physics,” and that Garfinkel and Goffman represented “subjectivism” as social phenomenology. His view was that this theoretical opposition had been instrumental in the neglect of “the practical mode of knowledge which is the basis of ordinary experience of the social world” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 25). Bourdieu also draws on Wittgenstein’s (1951) idea of language games. Games are a powerful analogy for understanding social practice partly because they vary in formality from free play to professional sports, reflecting the variation between everyday life and institutional contexts. The metaphor of the game therefore reflects the contrast between rules that emerge from practice and contexts marked by formal rules. Furthermore, games are played through the deportment of the body in practical accomplishment, in the setting of fields of play that define a material location and establish what counts as winning or losing the game. So, for example, in Bourdieu’s practice theory account, regularities in kinship relations are understood as resulting from strategies adopted by families in the context of laws of inheritance and succession that aim to achieve advantageous marriage partnerships. Furthermore, games are complex forms of bodily action played out in coordination with other players in which participants “have a practical mastery of the logic or immanent necessity of a game, which is gained through experience of the game, and which functions this side of consciousness and discourse” (Lamaison & Bourdieu, 1986, p. 111). This demonstrates the close fit between the game metaphor and key concepts in Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Practices are embodied, played out in cultural fields, according to the logic of practice, and based on the experience of the players and their skills (habitus) aiming to achieve the rewards available in the game. Fields are not defined by the experiences and accounts of social actors, but by the sociological observer as “structures that impose constraints on actors, of which they themselves are generally unaware” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 10). Expanding the metaphor of game playing to social life in general, Bourdieu (1990) understands practical sense to be derived from our social background